Bottom post of the previous page:
Caldari ECM prevents you from locking any sort of target for the duration. It is considered so standard and powerful that almost no gank fleet runs without them. Even in small scale war engagements ECM can completely wreck a fight.On the large warfleet level its a different beast, and specific racial fleets use their EWAR in different ways. Caldari EWAR breaks down from being the smothering force that it is and is instead used more often to completely destabilized enemy logistic ships or, better yet, break a logi chain, which allows caladi missile ships to blow everyone away quickly as their tank fails. Mimnitar EWAR, the target painter, is generally considered the weakest and most mimnitar EWAR ships are actually used as sniper webbing platforms, though it should be noted that target painters are fantastic for missile fleets as they increase the signature radius of small ships which massively increases missile damage. Also target painters allow big ships to hit smaller ships, as you can bloom an interceptor's signal radius to match a battleship. This isn't too great for Mimnitar's already schizophrenic combat doctrine, which is why Mimnitar is rarely flown exclusively and is instead used to add to other fleets. Galente use target dampeners and reduce the enemy targeting range or speed. Like the Mimnitar they are often used as sniper tacklers instead for warp distruptors, for which they get a range bonus, but they see straight use sometimes too, especially because sniping with warp scrambling isn't too useful. Of course they can always use EWAR drones. Amarr get two EWAR gimmics, they are generally the best at capacitor warfare, which allows them to either steal some of your energy or just destroy it, and they get tracking distruption boosts. Tracking distruption makes it so your guns have less optimal range and are more affected by traversal velocity. This doesn't mesh at all with Amarr combat doctrine, but luckily capacitor warfare is insanely strong in large scale engagements, helped by the fact that both the Amarr get one of the strongest capacitor EWAR ships in the game that can single handedly win fleet battles and the fact that their drone boat battleship is also a cap-warfare ship. However energy neutralization tends to break down if you are not in a T2 EWAR ship and are fighting something larger than yourself. Like Galente they also get good use out of EWAR drones which is why EWAR is more core in Amarr and Caldari fleets: Caldari is singularly powerful and Amarr just get so damn much. It is important to note that while I disagree with An0n3 that the Galente are significantly better than Amarr at drone use based purely on their hulls because, this is where the Galente usual range bonus on drones seriously shines compared to Amarr. Amarr ECM drones effectively don't get any benefit from Amarr hulls besides the fact that Amarr have huge drone bays that allow them to store a multiple types of drones at once, and range matters on ECM.
I am personally trained in the use of energy warfare modules due to my history as a nulsec scout, the skills overlap a lot, but I haven't ever personally fired a single shot in nulsec after my initial solidarity training gank my old corp made the scouts and support ships do. If we go to highsec war it will almost certainly be what I fly, but my role is definitely not a combat one. Scouts are there to basically guide the team to their target safely and keep them aware of danger.
